Letters to the Editor

When it comes to the Kindle, Alaskans are left out in the cold

I’ve been watching Jeffrey Hastings’s very interesting comparison of the Kindle and the iLiad ebook readers. While I think it’s quite good and a great companion to his print review, I think he needs to amend his statement that the Kindle download is available wirelessly virtually anywhere in the “continental” U.S.

People in Alaska are not finding that they can download, so his statement should probably be the “contiguous” U.S. We in Alaska are over the satellite horizon for a number of things, and I believe that sure connection to Amazon for Kindle downloads is one of the things we have to do without. I have read, but can’t confirm personally, that Montana is also in a “Sprint-free” zone, so perhaps “contiguous except for Montana” is even more accurate.

I realize that we are small population states, but there are SLJ readers in both places, so it might be nice to put a few words of text under the video to clarify Jeffrey’s Webcast review, and I realize he said something like the coverage is “almost” or “virtually” everywhere, but sitting in one of the places where Kindle is not viable, I’d like to see a small correction for accuracy if possible.

Corrections: In our March 2008 feature “Land of 10,000 Publishers” (pp. 54–57), we incorrectly cited the title of a Farmer’s Hat Productions book as Boating ABCs. The correct title is Bur Bur’s Boating ABC’s.

In our March 2008 TechKnowledge article “YA Books Get Second Life” (p. 24), we stated that the Eye4You Alliance island in Teen Second Life was a project of the Alliance Library System in East Peoria, IL, and the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC). In fact, Alliance is a partner, but the island is funded only by PLCMC.